A Memoir
In the Cracks,
Strength
Life Lessons on Resilience, Design,
and Leading with Purpose
"The Japanese repair broken pottery with gold — making the fracture lines more beautiful than the original vessel. This is my attempt at kintsugi with words."
In Memory
Principal Sir
(N Vayu Nandana Rao)
11 May 2026
A lifetime of believing in students
before they believed in themselves.
In the Cracks
My grandmother never filled the cracks in her courtyard.
Monsoon rains would pool in the fractures, and by morning, tiny wildflowers would push through — determined, a little ragged, completely unbothered by the fact that they were growing in concrete. "Let them breathe," she'd say, as if the ground itself needed to exhale after a long year of holding everything together.
I think about that courtyard a lot.
Cracks appear when something breaks. But they also appear when something begins — in the walls of our homes, in the lines on our hands, in the pauses between victories when we wonder if we have enough left to start again. I used to want to patch them, to smooth everything over into something presentable. It took me a long time to understand what my grandmother already knew: that the cracks aren't the problem. They're the whole point.
The Japanese have a practice called kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold, so the fracture lines become the most beautiful thing about the vessel. What was broken becomes, unmistakably, the story.
This memoir is my attempt at kintsugi with words. Not a success story — I've had too many failures for that. Not a leadership manual — I've made too many mistakes. Just a collection of moments, honest ones, from dusty roads and fluorescent-lit offices and sleeping bags under desks, from a grandmother's courtyard and a village mentor's veranda and a daughter's face when she realized I wasn't really watching.
Pour yourself some chai. Settle in.
The Cracks That Shape Us
Success is rarely neat. It's jagged, unpredictable, and sometimes it takes years to recognize.
We imagine it as a straight line ascending toward some distant peak, but the truth looks more like a river — bending around obstacles, cutting new channels when blocked, sometimes flooding, sometimes running nearly dry, always moving. The growth rings in a tree trunk tell the same story: the wide rings mark generous years, the narrow ones speak of drought. But every ring, wide or narrow, is part of what holds the tree upright.
I share my story in these pages not as a perfect path — I don't have one of those — but as a series of imperfect steps. Some were confident strides. Others were stumbles I barely recovered from. A few were spectacular faceplants that left me lying on the ground, reconsidering everything. But somehow, each step led to the next.
This is not a how-to manual. It's more like a field guide written by someone who walked through the territory and wants to show you the trails — including the ones that led nowhere, the switchbacks, and the clearings where something unexpectedly beautiful was waiting.
If you're looking for a blueprint, you might be disappointed. But if you're looking for company on an uncertain journey, you're in the right place.
Strength Within a Family
"Cracks in our lives are not voids to fall into, but spaces where strength begins to grow."
A Promise at Three
I was three years old when I made my first real promise.
I stood in the courtyard before my grandparents — small, serious, probably in a shirt that was slightly too big — and announced that I would take care of my sister. My grandmother bent down, her weathered hand resting on my head. She laughed. The kind of laugh adults give to children's innocent proclamations. "That's a big job for such a little man."
But in my heart, it wasn't funny at all. Even then, something in me understood that promises, once spoken, become truth.
My father was absent. Not in the way of dramatic departures or tragic losses, but in the quiet way of someone who had simply chosen a different life. His absence was like a shadow in our home — you couldn't touch it, but it colored everything. I noticed it in the way my mother's jaw tightened when neighbors asked harmless questions. In the empty chair where stories might have been told.
Here's the thing though: absence is not the same as emptiness.
The Architecture of Family
I grew up without a father, but I was never alone. Our neighborhood didn't just have families — it was family. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors — they formed an unspoken circle, a human architecture more stable than any four walls.
Our street was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass, lined with homes painted in sun-faded yellows and grays. In the evenings it transformed into something alive — gloriously, noisily alive. Stories moved from house to house like birds migrating. Someone's daughter had topped her class. Someone's son had landed a job in Bangalore — pride and worry mixed together, the way they always are.
Mornings in our home had their own rituals. The smell of filter coffee was our alarm clock, more reliable than any machine. My grandmother would wake first, always, and the sound of her moving through the kitchen — soft clatter of steel vessels, the rhythmic scrape of the stone grinder — was the soundtrack of safety. Coffee was never just coffee. It was ceremony. The brass filter, polished until it glowed, sat like a small temple on the counter. Patience, she used to say, is what makes coffee worth drinking.
Food was the language we spoke when words fell short. When someone was celebrating, we made sweet semolina pudding. When someone was grieving, we made rasam — that thin, peppery soup that somehow managed to feel like a hug in liquid form.
The Dusty Road to School
When I was four, I insisted on walking to school by myself — a full kilometer through streets still waking up. My mother resisted. I persisted, with the stubbornness that would later serve me reasonably well in business meetings and poorly in arguments at home.
That walk became mine in a way nothing had been before. I liked the weight of my satchel bouncing on my back. I liked the dogs who learned my schedule and wagged their tails when I passed. I liked the shopkeeper at the corner mom-and-pop store who would sometimes, when he was feeling generous, press a small candy into my palm — "On the house, little buddy!"
It made me feel like a person. Not someone's son or someone's grandson, but a person with a destination and the legs to reach it. Years later, when I left steady jobs or said yes to projects that made sensible people nervous, I realized they all had the same feeling as that walk. Alone, but not lonely. Self-reliant, but not isolated.
The Well That Remembered
Some of my sharpest memories are evenings in the courtyard when farmers from our ancestral village would visit — arriving dusty from the journey, carrying cloth bags of vegetables, village-made sweets and savories, and news from their world. They had opinions on everything and shared them without ceremony. No pretense. No sugar-coating. If something was foolish, they said it was foolish.
One uncle — we called him Babai — once told a story about a well that ran dry. The whole village panicked. They tried digging deeper. Only rocks. Some wanted to abandon it and start over. But one old and wise man said, "Wait. Sometimes the earth needs to remember where the water is." So they cleaned the well, removed the rocks, and waited. Three weeks later, water returned, cold and clear.
Babai looked at me directly then. "Patience is trust that things know how to heal."
I was ten. I didn't really understand it. But decades later, during a startup that was failing and every instinct screamed to abandon ship, those words came back. Not as wisdom I'd memorized. Just as a feeling — like water remembering where to go.
The School That Shaped Me
"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." — John Dewey
There was a third home, between the family courtyard and the bright-lit office: school.
Not just the building — the friendships forged there, the rituals that anchored us, the mentors who saw potential we couldn't yet see in ourselves. This was Vijayawada in the early 1980s, when the city was smaller and quieter, and the world moved at a pace that allowed for noticing things.
The Principal Sir
The soul of the school was our principal, N Vayu Nandana Rao Sir.
In the late 1980s, he made a decision that seemed radical for a small school in Vijayawada: offer IIT entrance exam coaching as part of regular education, at no extra cost, to the top 10 of the class. His reasoning was simple and, to other principals in the city, quietly infuriating: "If we prepare students for the hardest exam available, everything else becomes manageable. Why should only elite schools in Hyderabad develop these capabilities? Why not our students too?"
More than the syllabus, Principal Sir taught something else entirely.
"You think education is about marks. It's not. You think it's about IIT. It's not. Education is about becoming human. About developing your capacity to think clearly, to feel deeply, to contribute usefully. Marks are feedback, not verdict. Colleges are opportunities, not destinations. The real question is: are you becoming someone you're proud of? Someone who can face difficulty and not crumble? Someone who can help others and not just help yourself? That's what we're building here. Not mark-scoring machines. Humans with character."
Fifteen years old and stressed about maths, I heard those words but didn't fully understand them. They waited inside me. Seeds with very long germination periods. Years later, building a first product, I remembered: build humans, not machines. Decades later, mentoring teams, I remembered: help people become who they're proud of. Even later, as a father: develop character, not just capability.
Still There in His Eighties
I visited the school in 2023. Forty years had passed. Principal Sir was still there. Eighty-plus years old, still arriving early in the morning. Still walking through classrooms. Still knowing students' names.
We talked in his office — books everywhere, years of certificates covering every wall. I asked him why he was still doing it.
"What else would I do? This is my purpose. When you stop being useful, you start dying. I'm not ready to stop being useful. Every morning, I wake up knowing students need me. That gets me out of bed. That keeps me sharp. That gives every day meaning."
"Every student who walks through that gate carries potential they don't yet see. My job is to help them see it. To push them toward it. To believe in them until they believe in themselves. That work never gets old. How could I retire from that?"
Purpose extends life. Having work that matters beyond yourself creates a kind of vitality that rest and comfort cannot replicate. Principal Sir didn't stay sharp despite his age. He stayed sharp because he refused to stop being needed.
Principal Sir passed away on 11 May 2026. Still principal. Still arriving early in the morning. Still believing. For fifty-plus years he planted seeds in students — seeds with long germination periods, blooming in people long after they'd left his school and forgotten they'd been planted.
The Garden, the Shop, and the Computer
"Design is not about decoration — it is about arranging life so it works."
What My Mother Knew Without Knowing It
My mother's kitchen was eight feet by ten. One window. A single strip of morning light.
Within that space was a universe of quiet intentionality. Utensils gleamed in rows arranged not by size but by frequency of use — the things you reached for every day at eye level, the things you needed once a week on the lower shelf. When my mother cooked, she moved through that kitchen like a dancer who knows every step by heart.
She never studied efficiency. She lived it. I watched this for years without a name for what I was seeing. I know now it was design. Functional, unselfconscious, born entirely from attention to what worked.
My grandmother's garden was the same. Twenty feet by thirty, but arranged with a geometry only she could explain. Marigolds next to tomatoes to keep pests away. Tall plants giving shade to smaller ones. She hadn't read about permaculture. She'd simply paid attention, adjusted, tried again. She had, without knowing it, been practicing what corporations now pay consultants millions to teach them.
Big Dad's Shop
Then there was my big dad's automotive shop. He was my grandmother's brother, married into our family — but he filled the space where a father might have been. Not perfectly. Not completely. But more than enough.
The shop occupied a prime corner lot in front of a great spreading banyan tree, with a hand-painted signboard that announced, in confident lettering: All Tractors Spares Available and Repair Supported. His customers were farmers — men who smelled of earth and sunlight, who drove tractors they couldn't afford to lose for even a day. They'd arrive carrying worry they didn't always name.
Big dad moved through that space with a quiet authority that had nothing to do with title. Within minutes of conversation, he could tell whether a man was flush from a good harvest or quietly stretched thin. He never asked directly. He just listened, watched, and read the room. Sometimes he extended credit before anyone had to request it. "Pay me after the season," he'd say, and the farmer would nod the way people nod when a burden has been gently lifted without ceremony.
Watching him, I understood something I wouldn't have words for until much later: money builds things, but empathy is what makes people trust you with their hardest moments. That lesson from a tractor shop would follow me into every boardroom I ever entered.
Kumaravelu Sir
By engineering college — a computer science degree that finally gave formal language to everything I'd been drawn to — the pull toward order had found its natural home in computers. But the person who shaped me most during those years wasn't a professor or a textbook. He lived in a small village called Thiruppanangadu, two miles from campus.
Cycling there meant passing rice paddies that shimmered like mirrors, through lanes so narrow that branches brushed your shoulders. His name was Kumaravelu. Everyone called him Sir, spoken with the reverence usually reserved for family elders.
He taught me circuits and algorithms. But mostly, he taught me to sit with a problem before trying to solve it. Once, I cracked something difficult and was feeling rather pleased with myself. He smiled. "Good. Now solve it three other ways." When I asked why, since I already had the answer: "Because the first solution that comes is almost never the best. The best ones come after you've exhausted the obvious."
One evening on his veranda, as the village settled into its evening rhythms, he made chai — ginger crushed by mortar, cardamom split, tea leaves boiled with milk until the colour turned caramel. He poured through a strainer into steel tumblers too hot to hold for long.
"Education isn't really about knowledge," he said, blowing on his tea. "Knowledge is everywhere now. Anyone can access it." He paused. "Education is about character. About learning how to think, how to persist. Most of all, how to be useful to others."
That word — useful — has followed me ever since. Like a bell struck once but heard for years.
The First Enterprise
In 1999, I started assembling computers for classmates who wanted one but couldn't afford the branded ones. It started as curiosity. It became a small business by accident.
My first build was for a classmate named Ravi. I spread the components across my hostel desk — motherboard, processor, RAM, drives, case. It looked like a puzzle I wasn't sure would fit. I pressed the power button. Silence. Then fans spinning, drives whirring, a single beep from the motherboard speaker. The monitor flickered to life.
Ravi actually cheered.
That feeling — of something working that your hands had assembled — was better than any grade I'd ever received. Word spread. Within a semester I was "the computer guy." Once, a hard drive failed a week after delivery. I could have blamed the manufacturer. Instead, I replaced it with my own money. It cost me profit. It earned me reputation. At nineteen, I was already learning that the two are not the same thing.
Sleeping Bags and First Principles
"First principles are not a philosophy — they are survival."
Thrown Into the Deep End
I kept a sleeping bag under my desk. Most nights I used it.
When I stepped out of college into my first professional role in 2001, it felt like being thrown into the deep end of the ocean. One day you're a student, working on assignments with clear deadlines and clearer answers. The next day you're responsible for real problems, with real money at stake, for real people on the other side of the world.
Overnight, I was speaking to American and European clients. These weren't classroom exercises or friendly simulations. These were businesses — some small, some large, all demanding — counting on me to solve problems I had never encountered before.
The time zones alone were disorienting. When India slept, the world worked. When India worked, the world slept. That overlap, those precious few hours when both sides were awake, became crucial. But most of our work happened in the thin hours of the night, when darkness covered one side of the planet and daylight illuminated the other.
The hours were relentless. Eighteen-hour days became the norm. You'd start at 9 AM, work through lunch (often forgotten entirely), continue through evening, and then as the sun set in Hyderabad, the workday in America would begin. Calls at midnight, at 2 AM, at 4 AM.
This was my first real job — Hyderabad, early 2000s, the chaotic early days of offshore IT. Our response time commitment was twenty minutes, any hour of the day or night. Not to solve — that might take longer — but to acknowledge. We see you. We're on it. My BlackBerry sat by my sleeping bag, set to vibrate so violently it rattled the floor. I'd wake sometimes before the call came, body learning to anticipate the rhythm of demand. Someone across the world believed I could solve their problem within minutes. That belief was fuel. Every solved issue was proof the trust wasn't misplaced.
The Sketch That Saved Everything
I figured out early that most problems weren't technical. They were communication problems wearing technical clothing. Clients would describe what they wanted, but their words and our understanding lived in entirely different universes.
So I started drawing. Not beautifully — I have never been an artist. Rough boxes and arrows. Stick figures. "Is this what you mean? When the user clicks here, this happens?" The moment they saw the idea sketched out, something would shift. Their eyes would light up. "Yes! Exactly! But also—" Suddenly we were in conversation, not just transcribing requirements.
Today this is called UX, prototyping, design thinking. Back then it was just survival. I had to show clients I understood them before they lost faith — before they started wondering if they'd made a mistake trusting some kid in Hyderabad.
2 AM, and Ramesh
It was the sixth night of a brutal week. Multiple systems failing across multiple clients. I hadn't slept more than a few hours in five days.
Around 2 AM, I saw Ramesh sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. Not working. Not sleeping. Just sitting.
I walked over. "Hey." He looked up. His eyes were red. "I can't do this," he said quietly. "I'm done. I'm quitting tomorrow."
I pulled up a chair. Sat. Said nothing for a long moment. He continued: "Every time we fix something, two more things break. I feel like I'm drowning and no one cares."
I thought about offering perspective, context, a pep talk. But it was 2 AM and the only true thing I had was this: "I care."
Another silence. Then: "Go home. Sleep. Don't check email. I'll cover your work tonight." He stared at me. "You can't — you have your own—" "I can," I said. "Go home, Ramesh."
He looked at me as if I'd given him something he didn't expect to receive. Maybe I had. Maybe he was giving me something too — teaching me that you can't lead a team from above. You must carry each other. Sometimes you hold someone up. Sometimes someone holds you. That night I worked through his and mine. I remember the sky lightening outside the window, the cleaning staff arriving, surprised to find me still there. When Ramesh came in the next morning — he didn't quit — he brought homemade breakfast and said, "Thank you." Just that. It was enough.
First Principles
Those years cracked me in useful ways. They forced me back to what actually mattered. I started calling these first principles — not a philosophy, more like questions I ask when I'm lost:
- Am I being useful?
- Am I being present?
- Am I acting from values, or from fear?
- Will I be proud of this choice tomorrow?
- Am I serving, or just performing?
They still sting sometimes. That's how I know they're working.
Leading by Walking the Talk
"Leadership is not standing above; it is sitting beside."
Masters of IQ and EQ
Among those who shaped me in the early years of my career were people of extraordinary contrast.
One had the mind of a mathematician and the empathy of a poet. Another could glance at a log file and see patterns the rest of us missed — and yet still remember the security guard's birthday. They never lectured about culture. They lived it. They greeted the janitor the same way they greeted the CEO. They said thank you in meetings that went wrong. They refused to weaponize their intelligence.
Watching them was like attending a masterclass in unspoken leadership. IQ opens doors. But EQ is what keeps them open — and keeps people wanting to walk through them with you. A leader's steadiness in chaos is oxygen for everyone else in the room. Sharpness without kindness burns people out. Kindness without sharpness achieves very little. The leaders worth following held both at once, without apparent effort.
I began keeping mental notes. I still have them.
The 72-Hour Marathon
Leadership did not arrive in my life as a title or a promotion. It came in moments — unplanned, messy, sleepless moments — when a team looked to me and I realized there was no one else to step in.
Thursday afternoon. Forty-eight hours before a launch that couldn't move. We'd been preparing for months — a dealer management system going live across hundreds of automotive locations simultaneously, at midnight on a Saturday. Then we discovered the integration issue. The new system wasn't talking properly to the legacy inventory database. If we launched, hundreds of dealerships would go blind.
I looked around the conference room. Pale faces under fluorescent light. Everyone doing the same math, arriving at the same impossible answer.
"We're not postponing," I said. "The client can't reschedule — they've told every dealer, every customer. We go live Saturday midnight." A pause. "I'm not asking you to do anything I won't do. I'll be here the whole time. And when this is over, we take a week off. All of us. Full pay."
I didn't have authority to promise that last part. I'd fight for it afterward. But in that moment, the team needed to know their sacrifice wouldn't be forgotten.
We worked in rotation — not heroics, just shifts, because fresh eyes are better than tired heroes. I floated between groups, fetching whatever was needed. Around 2 AM on Friday, I found our database specialist scrolling through query logs, muttering to herself. "See there? Transaction timeout. And there again. The connections aren't pooling properly." She fixed it. We tested. Better.
Saturday midnight. Launch. For a few seconds, nothing. Then green lights across the board — successful logins, transactions processing, inventory syncing. The room erupted. Not quite celebration — everyone was too destroyed for that. But relief, enormous and real. In that moment, we were family. I sat alone in the empty office afterward, trying to understand what had happened. We hadn't won because of brilliant strategy or superior technology. We'd won because no one held back. Because I had sat beside them instead of above them.
Wearing Every Hat
On a national employment portal rollout for a state government, my job was to manage functional requirements, user experience, teams, and coordinate stakeholders. Reality had a different idea — I found myself drawn into the operationalization and orientation of a call center supporting citizens across 19 Indian languages.
One night I heard a new support agent, Sneha, struggling with an angry caller — an older man convinced the system was broken or biased. I walked over and tapped her shoulder. She handed me the headset gratefully.
"Hello sir. My name is Satish. I built this system. Let me see what happened."
Twenty minutes later: his photo had been blurry, the automated verification couldn't process it. I walked him through taking a new one, uploading again. His application went through. "Thank you, beta," he said, voice completely changed. "I'm sorry I shouted." After the call, Sneha looked at me like I'd done something extraordinary. "You didn't have to do that." "Yes I did," I said.
The Conflict No One Wanted to Have
Two senior team members — brilliant, indispensable, completely unable to work together. Ramesh, the architect, believed in doing things right even if it took longer. Anil, the delivery manager, believed getting it out the door was the only thing that mattered. Their disagreement was philosophical, which made it worse than a personality clash.
I called a meeting. Just the three of us. "This stops today." Then: "I don't want to hear who's right. I want to hear what you're afraid of."
A long silence. Then Ramesh: "That we'll build something fragile." Then Anil: "That we'll never finish. That perfect becomes the enemy of done."
So, you're both scared of failure. Just different kinds. Both legitimate. The question isn't who's right — it's how we respect both fears in the same project.
The project didn't just survive — it was better because both were in it.
The Go-To Guy
In time — I'm not sure exactly when it happened — I became the "go-to guy." The one people relied on when stakes were high, deadlines impossible, problems intractable. Need someone to interview candidates? Call Satish. Infrastructure setup for a new project? Satish. Employee recognition event? Satish. Crisis with a major client? Satish.
It was intoxicating, being needed. Being trusted. Being essential.
But it was also dangerous. Dependency breeds comfort, and comfort breeds stagnation. When you become the person everyone leans on, you stop leaning on others. You stop growing. You stop pushing beyond your current capabilities because your current capabilities seem sufficient.
I became very good at certain things: troubleshooting, crisis management, client relations, team building. But I plateaued. The curve of learning flattened. Each day felt similar to the last. Success became repetition rather than innovation.
More troubling, I realized I was enabling a system that couldn't function without me. That's not strength — it's fragility. A robust system shouldn't depend on any single person. If it does, you haven't built a system; you've built a vulnerability.
Walking Away at the Peak
At the height of that trust, when walking away seemed unthinkable, I did the unthinkable. I resigned.
My boss was stunned. "Why?" he asked. "You're doing great. You're on track for promotion. Clients love you. The team respects you. Why would you leave now?"
How do you explain that success itself can become a trap? That comfort is the enemy of growth? That sometimes you need to burn down the life you've built to discover what you're truly capable of?
I tried. "I need to apply myself fully," I said. "Not within the boundaries of one role or one company, but across possibilities. I need to test whether my instincts — about design, about usefulness, about people — can stand on their own."
He understood, eventually. Most people didn't. They saw security, salary, trajectory — all the things young professionals are supposed to want. They didn't see the cage, however gilded. It wasn't an act of rebellion. It was an act of necessity. Like a plant that's outgrown its pot, I needed more room for roots to spread, or I would strangle.
Leaving was terrifying. I had no concrete plan, no safety net, no guarantee the leap would lead anywhere but down. But staying felt like dying slowly. And between slow death and a risky life, I chose risk.
The Entrepreneur's Compass
"Entrepreneurship is usefulness in motion."
Widening the Canvas
Later, when I shifted to working as a consultant supporting multiple organizations at once, it came from the same hunger. One job could never absorb all that I wanted to try, all that I wanted to build. Consulting gave me the canvas to paint in wider strokes.
Each client became a different experiment in possibility. With one, I could test new design approaches. With another, I could implement innovative team structures. With a third, I could explore emerging technologies. Instead of optimizing one path, I was creating multiple trails, learning what worked where, why, and under what conditions.
The work was harder. Juggling multiple clients meant constant context-switching — one morning working on a healthcare system, the afternoon on a retail platform, evening on a government portal. Each had different tech stacks, different team cultures, different constraints and opportunities. But harder didn't mean worse. Harder meant growing. Every new context revealed patterns that single-focus work would have hidden.
Supporting Multiple Organizations at Once
As my transition from entrepreneur to consultant deepened, I found myself juggling sometimes three or four serious engagements simultaneously. People asked how I managed it. The truth? I didn't always manage it well. Context-switching is cognitively expensive, and there were weeks when the switching cost showed up in ways I wasn't proud of.
But the breadth taught me things that depth alone couldn't. I saw patterns. Technologies that worked beautifully in one context failed in another — and understanding why sharpened my judgment in ways no single engagement ever could. Team structures that enabled one client paralyzed another. Design approaches that resonated with some users confused others entirely.
I became a better consultant not despite the juggling, but because of it. Each client quietly informed my work with every other client — though I was always careful never to break confidentiality. The breadth was the lesson.
9i Solutions — Fifty Explorers
In 2005, I founded 9i Solutions. We started with four people and quickly became fifty — each project territory we hadn't mapped, technologies we were learning as we applied them, problems we were solving for the first time. We outsourced hardware projects to partners as the work expanded and grew to around a hundred and twenty people. But the spirit of those early four never left us.
Our first major project was an interactive 3D pain-management tool for the Rossiter Technique. The problem: the technique was nearly impossible to explain in words. We had no expertise in medical visualization. We said yes anyway. Six months of learning, building, failing, rebuilding. When Richard Rossiter saw therapists using it — pointing and rotating a 3D body instead of fumbling for words — he called it "exactly what I saw in my head but couldn't describe."
That sentence told me something about entrepreneurship I hadn't fully understood before: it's not about knowing how to do things. It's about being willing to figure out how to do things.
Ventures That Came from Feeling Something Was Wrong
Tuition Tree came from watching teachers struggle to reach students across towns and languages. We built a platform connecting scholars and students, with a question bank adaptable to any syllabus in any language. Long before edtech was fashionable.
AsmallIndia came from staying in families' homes on my travels across India. Extraordinary warmth, home-cooked meals, stories over tea — but none of it visible online. We created a marketplace rooted in trust rather than algorithms. Before Airbnb was a household name, we understood that hospitality in India isn't transactional. It's cultural. Almost sacred.
mReporter came from watching journalists stranded by geography — capturing footage at a protest but unable to get it to the newsroom. We built an app that chunked video files, compressed aggressively, uploaded in the background, resumed if connection dropped. The first time a journalist used it to break a story hours ahead of competitors, uploading raw footage from the field while still standing in it — that was all the validation I needed.
The first time someone told me they got their first job because of a system we'd built — I'm not sure anything I'd achieved before felt quite as real as that.
2-in-a-Box — My Favorite One
Of everything I built, one method stays closest to me. Traditional product development threw work over walls — analysts to designers to developers to testers, each group discovering too late what got lost in translation. We tried something different: pairing a UX Designer and a Business Analyst together from the very start, side by side. The BA worked through business logic. The Designer visualized it in real time. Together they'd find solutions that neither would have reached alone.
We halved delivery time because rework disappeared. Quality doubled — not because people worked harder, but because they worked together at exactly the moment when changes were still cheap. I'm still a little proud of this one.
Technology Meets Table and Stage
Creativity doesn't stay confined to one domain. After years in technology, I wanted to design experiences you could taste, smell, touch — not just see on screens.
I got involved with F&B brands — Quattro, XSB, and XS — where technology met design and cuisine. These weren't restaurants that happened to use technology. They were experiences orchestrated by it. Mobile-based POS when most restaurants still used paper. IoT inventory tracking stock in real time. Tab-based ordering sent directly to kitchen displays. Loyalty programs woven into payment flows. But the technology was invisible to diners. They just experienced seamless service, food arriving at the perfect moment, staff who seemed to know them.
Later came advising one of South India's largest catering and wedding-design companies — serving food to hundreds of thousands annually while choreographing ambience, flow, and memory. A wedding isn't food service. It's theatre. Guests need to move from ceremony to dinner to dancing without congestion or confusion. Food must arrive hot at precisely the right moments. The visual environment must transform throughout the evening.
We used technology to orchestrate all of it — logistics software for staff coordination, timing systems for kitchen output, lighting controls synchronized to event flow. What started as culinary service became a laboratory for design-driven operations. The lesson: great experiences, whether digital or physical, share the same bones — understand the user's journey, remove friction, delight at unexpected moments, make complexity invisible.
SkillPro — When Scale Becomes Human
Then came SkillPro, which changed my understanding of what building something could actually mean. We set out to train youth and workers across India, bridging the gap between skill and credential. Working with state governments, central ministries, and corporates, we created some of the first digital ecosystems where skill, job, and person met on one screen.
A young woman in rural Maharashtra could take a tailoring course, get certified, have her profile automatically shared with garment manufacturers. A man in Bihar could learn plumbing through video modules and receive credentials recognized across the country. Scale brought real challenges — systems that worked for thousands broke when serving millions. Content in English needed translating not just into Hindi but into dozens of regional languages, each carrying cultural context that didn't directly translate. We learned humility. We learned that serving the underserved requires listening more than building.
The Design & Innovation Lens
"Design is empathy turned into architecture."
The Call That Hurt
The Transport Commissioner, Government of Andhra Pradesh, was direct: "My vendor doesn't understand our users. They lack design maturity. I'm not confident they can deliver."
I was in the room as an advisor. The words landed hard — precisely because they were right.
The team had been coding requirements, not creating experiences. They had forgotten that on the other end of every transaction was a person trying to accomplish something while probably also answering a phone call and dealing with someone standing at the counter.
I gathered the team. "We stop coding. Completely. For three days, no one writes a line of code. We're going to go watch real people try to use what we've built."
We visited offices and dealerships. I sat beside a service advisor as he toggled between four screens to complete a single transaction. I watched a salesperson apologize to a customer: "Sorry, the system is slow today" — his polite way of saying our interface required too many steps. Three days of notes. Then rapid prototyping. After three days, we presented to the Commissioner — not code, but a clickable prototype annotated with field observations from the floor.
"You get it now," the Transport Commissioner said. "This is what we needed to see. That you understand our people." Not a single line of code had changed. Everything had.
Projects That Still Matter to Me
2003 — Pain made visible. A physiotherapist told me: "Pain is invisible until someone draws it." The Rossiter system let therapists tap a muscle group and show patients exactly where the pressure was going, why, what would happen. Patients' anxiety decreased — and anxiety is a significant component of pain. Design didn't just explain the treatment. It amplified its effectiveness.
2006 — Evo 360 and the Watch That Spoke. A circular wearable with call and message functions — primitive by today's smartwatch standards but genuinely ahead of its moment. We 3D-printed prototypes in borrowed labs, learned Bluetooth protocols from online forums, and pitched to investors who thought we were eccentric engineers. When one asked why anyone would talk into a watch, I said, "Because sometimes hands are busy." He laughed. Ten years later, the world would echo the idea. We were early. Sometimes that's the price of being right.
2008 — Dignity in an LMS. We built a learning platform vernacular-first — icons instead of jargon, offline-capable for 2G networks and cheap Android phones. A machine operator in his fifties, completing his first digital course, seeing "Certificate of Completion" appear on screen. He called his wife from the print station. "I got a certificate from the company." That moment was not in any product requirement. But it was the whole point.
2009–2013 — Sashakt. With Intel and the Government of Maharashtra, we built a health-monitoring solution for rural India — for Auxiliary Nurse Midwives working under trees, in clinics without consistent electricity. Offline-first. Interfaces built on colour and shape rather than text. Green meant healthy. Yellow meant watch. Red meant act now. Each data point was a heartbeat recorded in dust — a child vaccinated on schedule, a malnourished baby identified early.
2012 — Gentleness as a design principle. For a women's health startup, the challenge wasn't accuracy. It was trust. The device communicated through vibration patterns and soft tones, not screens. Results stayed local unless the user chose to share. It looked like a personal care item, not medical equipment. That project taught me: sometimes the most sophisticated thing you can do is be quiet.
Three Frameworks, One Thread
Experience Engineering emerged from the day I realized that measuring page load times while ignoring whether users felt capable was fundamentally incomplete. We started treating experience as data — mapping emotion alongside function, tracking frustration and delight with the same rigour as uptime. Instead of "this feature works correctly," we asked "does this feature make users feel capable?" It changed what "done" meant.
Platform Engineering came from watching teams suffocate while waiting for permission. I started building self-service systems where teams could create, deploy, and iterate without asking anyone. The measure of success: how much innovation happened spontaneously because the path was clear and the tools were ready.
Human–AI Collaboration is where I am now. AI brings speed, pattern recognition, tirelessness. Humans bring judgment, context, ethics, the ability to know what matters and why. Together they accomplish what neither can alone. I'm living this daily — every design decision informed by AI analysis, guided by human wisdom. It feels less like a new era and more like a continuation of the same question I've always been asking: how do we make things more useful for people?
Failures That Cut Deeper
Drowning in Work
The fire also burned me. Success never comes without cost, and my costs were paid by the people who mattered most.
I often drowned in work so fully that family blurred into background noise. There were months — many months, strung together into years — when I was absent in presence. Physically home but mentally elsewhere, my mind stuck in the office even as my body sat at the dinner table. My wife would tell me about her day, and I'd nod mechanically, offering responses that were technically appropriate but emotionally absent. My daughter would show me drawings, and I'd glance without really seeing, offering praise that was sincere but distracted.
They deserved presence, not just proximity. The worst part wasn't that I didn't care. I did. But work had become a drug, and I was addicted to the feeling of being needed, being essential, being the person who solved impossible problems. That addiction demanded feeding, and the people I loved paid the price.
Taking On Too Much
Sometimes I leaped too quickly, accepting too many projects, scattering focus like dandelion seeds in wind. I believed I could do everything because I had done difficult things. But difficult is not the same as infinite.
Ambition without patience turns reckless. Opportunities are not riches if they make you careless. Saying yes to everything means saying no to doing anything well. I damaged relationships because I wasn't present enough to maintain them. I built half-solutions when full ones were needed, leaving trails of almost-success that helped no one.
The Successful Failure
Perhaps the hardest lesson was my first startup. I poured everything into it — money I'd saved, relationships I'd built, credibility I'd earned. The idea was sound: an education platform connecting tutors and students globally. The execution was premature. We launched too early with too many features, tried to serve too many markets at once, pivoted too frequently, chasing trends rather than building fundamentals. Within two years, we had burned through capital and goodwill.
I called it a "successful failure" — we learned immensely even as we failed commercially. But that framing, honest though it was, couldn't erase the sting of letting down employees who had trusted me, customers who had depended on us.
Failure teaches humility in ways success never can. Success whispers that you're smart, destined. Failure shouts that you're human, fallible, capable of spectacular misjudgment. Both lessons are necessary. But only failure's lessons penetrate deep.
Beyond Work — Life in Balance
"Balance is not a formula — it's a dance."
Angkor Wat at Dawn
There's a moment in Cambodia I return to often.
We arrived at Angkor Wat before the tourist crowds, in the thin early light. Walking through ruins that had once housed thousands — priests, kings, servants, devotees — centers of power and faith now reduced to stone and silence.
I stood in the middle of it and thought about the systems I'd helped build, the companies I worked for, the products I designed. Would any of it last in a hundred years? Fifty? Ten?
I didn't need to build things that lasted forever. I needed to build things that mattered now, to the people who touched them. A system that helped someone find a job mattered, even if it was obsolete in five years. The temporary value was still value.
What I've Slowly Figured Out
Balance is not a destination. I have not arrived. Some weeks, work still swallows me. What has changed is that I no longer chase perfection — I chase presence.
A few things that help: Weekends and any plans made by the family are sacred. Sometimes it's okay to mix work with a family trip — but only with proper compartmentalizing and the discipline to actually close the laptop when the moment calls for it. When I'm struggling, I say so. Family doesn't need a superhero. They need a human being they can support and who supports them.
It is a dance. Still imperfect, always unfinished, deeply human.
Legacy & Future
"Legacy is not about permanence — it is about resonance."
Abhilash
He joined the team fresh from college, talented and terrified in roughly equal measure.
His designs were beautiful — genuinely beautiful. But they didn't solve actual user problems. They solved the problem of looking impressive in a portfolio. After one particularly difficult review, I sat with him.
"Your designs are beautiful," I said. "But beauty without purpose is decoration. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution."
"Let me show you something." I pulled up the project — a banking app for elderly users. "My grandmother is seventy-eight. She's sharp and curious and wants to manage her money independently. But her hands shake slightly. Her vision is good but not perfect. She's afraid of making mistakes because banking feels serious and permanent. When you design this, you're designing for her — for that specific fear, that specific tremor, that specific wish to feel capable."
Three weeks later he showed me revised work. Larger touch targets. High contrast. Undo buttons everywhere. The beauty was still there. Now it served someone.
Years later he reached out — he's now a lead designer, mentoring his own team. "I still ask myself that question," he wrote. "Would your grandmother feel confident using this? It changed how I see design."
That's legacy. Not something I built. Something I sparked in someone else, that continues without me.
The Honest Truth
I am not the smartest technologist. There have always been people around me who are simply brilliant — my first boss, still a coding ninja at an age when most executives have long since stopped writing a single line; analysts who could distill a hundred-page requirements document into three essential questions in minutes; leaders who didn't need authority to inspire, because people just worked harder around them, the way plants lean toward light.
I am not an easy leader. I was not a straightforwardly successful entrepreneur. But I listen well. I empathize deeply. I connect dots between disciplines. I persist. I care about dignity in ways that shape everything I build. And if there's one thing decades of mistakes have given me, it's a fairly reliable sense of what not to do — which, it turns out, is a genuinely useful skill.
For a long time, I tried to compensate for what I lacked. Now I lean into what I have. That shift — from compensation to authenticity — changed everything quietly, without fanfare, the way most real changes happen.
Standing for People
A team member was struggling — personal issues, health challenges, stress compounding. Her work suffered. Management wanted to manage her out. I argued against it. "She's going through something temporary. Let me work with her." I was told she was bringing down the team. My reply: "Everyone is watching how we treat her. They're learning what happens when they need help."
We adjusted her responsibilities, connected her with support, gave her space. Three months later she was back to full capacity. Five years later, one of the strongest performers, most loyal people on the team. But the more lasting thing was what everyone else saw: this team doesn't throw people away when they stumble. That knowledge, quietly held, creates safety. Safety creates honesty. Honesty creates the kind of work that actually matters.
If my daughter one day reads these words, I hope she sees someone who tried — despite failures — to stand for goodness. Who believed usefulness was a form of love. Who sometimes got it very wrong, kept trying anyway, and loved her more than any of it.
The Compass of Leadership
Over years of projects, crises, and quiet celebrations, my leadership compass settled around five directions. These aren't slogans — they're survival rules carved from sleepless nights.
Decisiveness when time is short. Hesitation multiplies chaos. Better an imperfect decision owned fully than perfection that arrives too late. In a crisis, people need someone to make a call — not necessarily the perfect call, but a clear one.
Honesty when truth is hard. Teams sense concealment faster than most managers imagine. Transparency buys forgiveness. People can handle hard truths. What they can't handle is discovering the lie later.
Empathy when people are tired. Fatigue blurs logic. A kind word revives more energy than any incentive chart. Sometimes the best leadership is simply saying, "Go home. Rest. We continue tomorrow."
Results when excuses are tempting. Compassion and accountability must coexist. Explanations don't ship products or solve problems. At some point, the work has to land.
Walking the talk, especially when no one is watching. Integrity measured in private defines credibility in public. The real test isn't what you do on stage. It's what you do when you think nobody's looking. Because someone always is.
The Playbook
"Not commandments. Just anchors."
These are not rules. They're things I keep returning to — fragments collected through years of falling, learning, and standing again. Take what's useful. Leave the rest. And eventually, write your own.
Happiness is contentment, not arrival.
We keep telling ourselves: once I get that job, that house, that achievement — then I'll be happy. But it's a moving target, always. Happiness is being content with what is while still caring about what could be. The most reliable path I've found: focus on being useful. Contribution generates its own contentment.
It all starts and ends in the mind.
Your mind is your greatest ally and your most dangerous opponent — sometimes within the same hour. Learn to debate yourself, to think in chains of consequence, to create distance between feeling and reaction. When pain hits, I remind myself out loud: "This is not permanent." It sounds simple. It works.
Aim to be less wrong, not to be right.
Everything is approximate. The universe runs on probabilities. We all make spectacular misjudgments — I certainly have. What matters is whether you examined the mistake honestly and moved one step closer to less wrong. Empathy matters more than accuracy. You can be completely correct and completely useless if you don't understand what people actually need.
Everyone is a hypocrite. Including you. Including me.
I preach work-life balance and have failed at it more times than I'd like to count. The sin isn't the hypocrisy — it's refusing to acknowledge it. Honesty with yourself first, then the grace to keep trying.
Everybody knows something you don't.
The janitor knows things about the building that the CEO doesn't. The newest person on the team sees things with fresh eyes that you've long stopped seeing. Approach every conversation with genuine curiosity. Pride blocks learning. Humility accelerates it.
Don't fix what isn't broken.
Not every crack is a flaw. I spent years inserting myself into situations that didn't need me, offering unsolicited fixes, making things worse with good intentions. Now I pause first: is this actually broken, or just different? Will my involvement help, or relieve my own discomfort at seeing imperfection?
Practice. Don't preach.
Walk it first. When I advocate for user empathy, I go sit with users myself. And when someone is speaking to you, listen to understand — not to prepare your response. Most people are already writing their reply while the other person is still talking. That's not listening. That's waiting to talk.
Too many options are dangerous.
When I had too many clients, I served none of them well. Possibility is seductive, but it can rob you of the depth that comes from actual commitment. Sometimes the wisest thing is to stop looking for something better and extract the full value from what you already have.
No job is too big or too small.
I've cleaned office floors when the cleaning staff was absent. I've answered support queues when the team was overwhelmed. Not because it was my job — because it needed doing and I was there. The moment you decide honest work is beneath you is the moment you've lost perspective.
Be kinder than necessary.
It costs nothing. It changes things. Be kind to yourself when you fail. Be kind to strangers — you don't know what day they're having. Be kind to the people who support you, because they see more of your real self than anyone.
When you see genuine goodness, say so.
Some people go to extraordinary lengths for others, quietly, without recognition. Tell them you see it. Goodness unacknowledged wavers. A few honest words can sustain something valuable in someone for years.
Done and imperfect beats perfect and never.
Waiting for perfect conditions means never starting. I'll take a passionate imperfect effort over a flawless idea that never shipped. Progress matters more than polish.
Be careful who you let in.
Not everyone deserves access to your energy, your time, your inner life. Guard the doors of your life thoughtfully — not cynically, but with clarity. Choose people whose flaws you can live with and whose strengths you genuinely admire.
Don't worship money or possessions.
Use them. Enjoy them. Let them serve you. But don't let them define you. The difference between wealthy-and-miserable and modest-and-content was always relationships, not resources.
Luck favors the prepared.
I've been lucky many times. But I could only use the luck because I'd done the work — built skills, maintained relationships, kept a reputation. Prepare as though everything depends on you. Then hold the outcome lightly.
Logic has limits. Stories don't.
People are not convinced by data alone. They are moved by narrative. The same information, presented as statistics versus presented as a story about a real person, lands completely differently. Meet people where they are — emotionally, not just logically.
You don't need permission.
Nobody will hand you a certificate saying "you're ready now." Authority follows initiative more often than the reverse. See a problem? Start solving it. You need courage to begin and persistence to continue. The permission arrives later, sometimes, in the form of results.
Adventure doesn't need a mountain.
It's in the new route to work, the book in an unfamiliar genre, the conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like yours. The morning coffee made exactly right. Adventure is a posture, not a destination.
Past is motivation. Present is real. Future is imagination.
Learn from the past — don't live in it. Plan for the future — don't let it steal today. The present is the only place where life actually happens. Balance all three, but live in the present enough to actually experience it.
The greatest risk is taking none at all.
Comfort zones are warm and familiar and where dreams go quiet. Step out, even late. It is never too late. The best time was earlier. The second-best time is now.
Better no opinion than a borrowed one.
The world is loud with certainty. Listen, consider, then form your own views. If you don't know enough yet, say so. Borrowed certainty collapses under the first real question.
Rules exist for reasons. Not all reasons still exist.
Follow rules generally. Question them occasionally. Break them rarely, thoughtfully, with full accountability. Enough respect to take rules seriously, enough courage to bend them when a human being needs it more than a policy needs to be maintained.
Empathy is always possible.
Every person carries a story that explains who they are. Empathy doesn't mean accepting bad behavior — it means understanding context before reacting. Ask "what's really happening here?" before assigning blame. It changes almost everything.
Saying no is a form of power.
Yes pleases in the moment. No protects over time. The more easily you say yes, the less valuable your yes becomes. Say no with clarity and kindness — you don't need elaborate excuses.
Save your energy for what matters.
Someone cut you off in traffic. A colleague was passive-aggressive in a meeting. None of this deserves your emotional investment. Guard your attention zealously — it's finite. Spend it on injustice worth fighting, on people worth caring for.
The playbook is not mine. It is yours to write.
An Open Page
Stories end. Journeys don't.
Somewhere right now, a child is making a promise they'll spend a lifetime keeping. Somewhere, a leader is choosing to listen instead of command. Somewhere, a designer is prototyping a solution to a problem nobody else has noticed yet. Somewhere, an entrepreneur is starting something the world doesn't know it needs.
The cracks remain — as they must — to let the light through.
I think about my own journey often now. Not with regret for what didn't work, or pride in what did, but with gratitude for the whole of it. The failures taught me humility. The successes taught me to serve. The cracks taught me where strength lives.
If there's one thing I'd want you to carry from all of this, it's simple: resilience is not the absence of failure. It's the quiet act of beginning again. And again. As many times as necessary.
The open page ahead of you is yours to fill — not with perfect prose or flawless execution, but with honest effort and genuine intention.
When your cracks appear — and they will — remember: they are not flaws to hide or problems to overcome. They are invitations. Places where light enters. Spaces where strength begins to grow.
In the cracks, strength.
About the Author
Satish Velagapudi is a User Experience Strategist, Principal Product Owner, and Rapid Delivery Evangelist focused on AI, Design, and Experience Engineering. Over more than two decades, he has shaped products and platforms at the intersection of technology and empathy — from national citizen-service portals serving millions, to enterprise systems powering global businesses, to intimate health applications requiring the gentlest touch.
His journey began in Hyderabad, India, where a childhood shaped by absence and community taught him that cracks are not voids but spaces where strength grows. He founded 9i Solutions, pioneered the 2-in-a-Box collaboration method, and developed frameworks for Experience Engineering and Platform Engineering now practiced by teams across industries. At OSI Digital, where he currently serves, he continues to push boundaries at the intersection of human-centered design and emerging technologies.
Beyond the professional accomplishments, Satish is a husband learning patience, a father learning presence, a traveler learning perspective, and a human being learning that balance is not a destination but a dance. He believes the real purpose of life is usefulness.
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